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Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff.Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

If everyone reading this donated $5, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, €10, ¥1000 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder

Where your donation goes

Technology: Servers, bandwidth, maintenance, development. Wikipedia is the #5 website in the world, and it runs on a fraction of what other top websites spend.

People: The other top 10 websites have thousands of employees. We have fewer than 100, making your donation a great investment in a highly-efficient not-for-profit organization.

I’ve just donated myself, and put my comment : “I was just moved by the letter written by the wikipedia founder. This is what we need in this world, a free knowledge. Knowledge should be kept free for everyone. It’s a human right to have a knowledge. Wikipedia is a place to get it. It’s a 100 percent free library. So, I feel the need to donate and let wikipedia grow bigger because knowledge is borderless. It needs more servers for this great cause.”

Wikipedia has been helping us all with providing a huge library of knowledge for free. Now , we should help Wikipedia grows bigger, because knowledge is growing endlessly.